[  Currently: Working  ]
As someone who loves "what ifs," this game sounds totally cool. I may also check out the prof’s book.

One of the first PC games I ever played was this strategic simulator that starts off something like, "The Prime Minister of Israel has been assassinated. The Knesset has chosen you as the interim PM. Get to work!" Now this was back in the days before anyone outside a lab owned a hard drive–the game was run off a single 5 1/4" floppy. This was back when floppies were actually, you know, floppy. So it was just a map and text. You had to make economic and political treaties, buy arms from the US, France, the USSR, and a mysterious guy with a South African accent (the more you bought, the better deals and more interesting stuff they offered later), start up and fund anti-government groups in neighboring countries, betray those groups and assassinate their leaders when they started getting out of hand–man, it was amazingly complex for how tiny it was.

It would probably be too politically incorrect to make such a game today, but that seems to be the goal of the developers in the story link. If it can simulate without being too distorted by ideology, it could be more than just a fun game–a beefed up version could be used by governments.